Following the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929, Richard Strauss was seeking a new librettist. Zweig was the ideal candidate, well-established and with an ability to move between fiction, non-fiction and drama.

Due to the political situation in Germany at the time, they were only able to complete one opera together, beginning work on Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) in the early 1930s. By the time that Hitler came to power in January 1933, the piano score and the orchestration of the first of the opera's three acts was ‘as good as finished’. As a Jew, however, Zweig was not welcome within Reich culture. But the Nazis were stuck: could they possibly ban an opera written by Richard Strauss, the president of the Reichsmusikkammer? Eventually the decision came from Hitler himself, who noted what he perceived as a ‘slur’ against the Reich, but allowed the performances to go ahead.

It was, however, to be Zweig’s last stand. A letter from Strauss to him was intercepted by the Gestapo, in which the composer asked Zweig to begin work on a second opera. Seeing this as a clear affront to their authority, the Nazis condemned Die schweigsame Frau and terminated Strauss and Zweig’s collaboration. In 1934, Zweig fled to Britain, living first in London and then in Bath, before moving to New York in 1940 and finally, later that year, to Rio de Janeiro, where he and his wife killed themselves by taking a barbiturate overdose.

‘Something else was beginning’, Zweig had written in his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), ‘a new time, and who knew how many hells and purgatories we still had to go through to reach it?’ But on the last pages of his memoir, Zweig had also offered a note of hope, not unlike the sunset described in the last of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. ‘Every shadow’, he offered, ‘is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives’.

2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss’s birth. The composer has been celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (which ran until 13 July).

Living in Garmisch, Richard Strauss would have heard a lot of folk music in the surrounding countryside, including the famous Alpine yodel, which makes appearances in a couple of his scores.

First, rather fittingly, there is a yodel in Eine Alpensinfonie, played by an oboe in a scene entitled ‘Auf der Alm’ (In the Alpine pasture). The yodel crops up, slightly more surprisingly, in Arabella, when the Fiakermilli, the belle of the Coachman’s ball in Vienna, sings ‘Die Wiener Herrn verstehen sich auf die Astronomie’.

Strauss mimics the yodel’s characteristic shifts between chest and head voice in the Fiakermilli’s flurry of coloratura effects, wowing the other ball guests.

2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss’s birth. The composer has been celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (which ran until 13 July).

Richard Strauss employed a wide range of percussion instruments in his works, including the xylophone.

Although the score of Salome – one of the composer's most famous operas – contains no mention of the xylophone, a Holz- und Strohinstrument (wood and straw instrument) is listed. The name of this precursor to the xylophone describes the crude way in which the wooden bars of the instrument rested on straw supports. Such a design may suggest delicate, restrained usage but Strauss was characteristically demanding of its player, writing streams of semiquaver scales for the frenzied climax of the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’.

Salome is far from being Strauss's most extravagant score when it comes to such percussive effects. Die Frau ohne Schatten, for instance, boasts a glockenspiel, xylophone (listed under its modern name), five Chinese gongs, cymbals, side drum, rute (bound birch twigs), sleigh bells, bass drum, large tenor drum, triangle, tambourine, two pairs of castanets and tam tam. All these instruments compete for pit space with the glass harmonica, two celestas, and two harps; as well as the wind machine, thunder machine and four tam tams off stage. It adds up to a gigantic orchestra of over 100. 'It is extraordinary that Strauss had a brain that could conceive all [the opera] and a heart to express it', said conductor Semyon Bychkov in a recent interview.

2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss’s birth. The composer has been celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (which ran until 13 July).

Strauss is a common German surname. Richard shares it, of course, with the Viennese family who came to dominate dance music during the 19th century, first with Johann Strauss I, then with his son Johann Strauss II and his slightly less famous brothers.

While not related, Richard Strauss maintained his namesakes’ predilection for triple time. He frequently uses waltz forms in his operas and both Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ and Elektra’s final triumphant dance swing into three-four time. The younger Johann Strauss’s widow was present when Salome had its Austrian premiere in Graz, in the same room as luminaries including Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

And then, of course, there’s Der Rosenkavalier, which is set in 18th-century Vienna, but sounds much more like the Golden Age of Johann Strauss II, the time in which the drama of Strauss’s later opera Arabella unfolds. The charm of the waltz permeates Der Rosenkavalier and gives the piece an aura of melancholy beauty; the opera was a huge success on its premiere in 1911, and became one of Strauss's most popular works.

Like many composers and artists before him, Richard Strauss felt himself drawn towards Vienna during the first decades of the 20th century.

The imperial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been the centre of musical creativity in Europe for over 150 years. Strauss’s collaboration with the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal to the city made Vienna even more attractive to the composer, and the two set both Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella there.

Strauss moved to the city after World War I to take up the directorship of the Staatsoper, a position previously held by Gustav Mahler. But the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a consequence of its defeat in the War had turned the former imperial hub into the capital city of a small, landlocked republic. While Strauss and his colleague Franz Schalk oversaw a happy period in the Staatsoper’s history, the premiere of Die Frau ohne Schatten in Vienna on 10 October 1919 fell on stony ground. Conceived before the horrors of the war, and the termination of an opulent empire, it was first performed to a broken society, wearied by the excesses of successive emperors and empresses. It would be the only opera Strauss chose to debut in Vienna during his tenure at the Staatsoper.

It is a word that appears in the librettos for many of Richard Strauss’s operas, including Elektra, and it is a fitting word to describe the many eerie orchestral effects Strauss created to tell these stories in microscopic orchestral detail. Flutter-tonguing woodwind and brass depict a flock of sheep in his tone poem Don Quixote, the wind audibly howls and haunts Herod in Salome, the ‘silver rose’ music of Der Rosenkavalier glitters, and we hear Daphne’s transformation from nymph to laurel tree as much as see it.

However, this year, The Royal Opera performs two Strauss operas which feature extraordinary parts for tenors – the Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten and Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos – for whom Strauss provides some of his most ardent melodies.

The Austrian city of Salzburg is perhaps most famous as the birthplace of Mozart. It's also situated around 100 miles east of Richard Strauss’s home in Garmisch.

Festivals celebrating Mozart have taken place there since the late 1870s. In 1917, Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, director Max Rheinhardt, designer Alfred Roller and the conductor Franz Schalk – with whom Strauss ran the Staatsoper in Vienna from 1919 to 1924 – collectively decided to formalize these efforts and widen the festival's remit, creating an annual summer arts festival.

The Salzburg Festival opened on 22 August 1920 with a performance of Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann play, a work now performed each year. In 1922 the work of Strauss and Mozart briefly converged as Strauss conducted Don Giovanni, the first operatic production staged at the event.

The Salzburg Festival has since been home to the premiere of the revised version of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Die ägyptische Helena in 1933 and the first performance of Die Liebe der Danae after Strauss’s death, staged in 1952. The production had originally been planned for 1944, but following the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler, Joseph Goebbels declared ‘total war’ and closed all the theatres and performing venues within the Third Reich. However, the Nazis permitted one dress rehearsal of Die Liebe der Danae – the only time Strauss would hear the work live. The Salzburg Festival has continued to proselytize its founder’s work.

While Strauss never shared Ritter’s passion for Catholicism, he followed his (and Wagner’s) philosophical lead by reading the works of Schopenhauer, which inspired Strauss’s first opera Guntram (1894). Ritter died two years later, but his influence remained, even though Strauss turned his attentions towards Nietzsche, Wagner’s arch enemy.

The business-minded Richard Strauss was keen to make his operas work well financially. But they were often tricky to produce, with their lavish orchestrations and highly complex scores, so Strauss went about creating a series of orchestral highlights that could be performed outside the opera house.

First came Salomes Tanz, a concert version of the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ from Salome. The gorgeous waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier were also stripped of their narrative and published as two Walzerfolge (or waltz sequences), before Strauss and the Polish conductor Artur Rodziński produced an additional suite from the opera. Strauss also created a Symphonisches Fantasie from Die Frau ohne Schatten and separately published the interludes from Intermezzo, all testaments to his keen eye on the coffers.